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Comment by CamouflagedKiwi | Hacker News Reader

This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood.

The wood barely moves after it's split. If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side (they're pushed outwards by the axe).

You can't just randomly split it across the grain into slices like you're slicing bread.

I guess mostly: it's not tiring, which sort of sucks when you're doing it for real, but it is satisfying. This doesn't scratch that itch for me, but I guess it's fun in a way, similar to that cleaning simulator thing.

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For players who are new to the game, there should be a 1/4 chance you go to bed proud of an honest day's work with your hands, and wake up the next morning having strained a muscle you didn't even know you had, and you can't chop wood for the next couple weeks.

As someone who recently did some hand splitting of firewood I can directly relate to this.

Yes, and possibly a constellation of little cuts and bruises on your shins.

There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.

In former times you had to serve a twelve year apprenticeship before you could be trusted to split wood for barrels, you can do a PhD in rocket science in less time.

It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)

If it came from the base of the tree the wood grain will probably be squirrelly and practically unsplittable. Get a chainsaw or hydraulic woodsplitter, or throw them in a bonfire. Alternatively, use them in a woodworking project or innoculate them with your favorite mushroom spores.

These are also good for those "Swedish logs" where you drill a hole in the top and the side, and then cut grooves with a hand saw in the top and make a fire right on top.

Well they're about 4ft diameter and not really even possible to move. My electric chainsaw would just burn up trying to cut them, and the cost of a hydraulic woodsplitter wouldn't be cost-effective.

Current plan is just to leave them there until either they start drying/rotting enough to split, or I find someone who wants to take them off my hands.

I got some burly maple ends that even my 22-ton hydraulic splitter can't handle. Toss 'em into the woods, let nature take care of 'em.

Are you trying to split it with an axe? You need a sledgehammer and a few splitting wedges. The sledge lets you apply a lot more force than an axe and striking the wedge focuses that force onto a small area. The first wedge will open a crack, then you use additional wedges to expand that crack until she splits.

Source: grew up in a wood burning family, helped split many stubborn hardwood trees (all by hand).

The dude in the comments above suggested a maul, which seems nice (kinda like an axe and a sledge built into one tool)

A wedge is still useful with a maul. Sometimes to split a large-diameter log, you'll want to start a split and insert the wedge to open it, then you continue the split with the maul. It's helpful if you have timber that doesn't have a straight grain and doesn't want to split open.

If it didn't require flights, I'd bring my maul and wedges and take on your challenge.

Big rounds are the most fun.

Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC872sqjMNC8kHU0GU0ShZFw while cautioning that she seems to be genetically engineered to split wood. Her technique is like watching an Olympic athlete. No wasted motion at all, all energy delivered to the maul straight down. She’s a muse.

Wow! Great link. I’m better than average but… yeah, I’d upgrade her to goddess. She’ll just carve a new axe handle when she feels like it. Truly humbling.

She's got a video where she explains in detail how to chop. She goes through everything from stance - including protecting the shins - to axe technique. Absolutely terrific - I feel a strained shoulder just watching the videos.

https://youtu.be/CQmom_0R1Wk

I just knew who this was going to be before I even opened the link. One of the few accounts I miss from having deleted Instagram from my phone!

My grandfather was like this, and not with soft wood. We try to burn Australian hardwoods and that takes quite a bit of force to split. He could pound through it like a knife through butter. There’s a definite art to hardwood, looking where the slightest fault might be. You can’t just smash it in the middle, your block splitter (preferred) or axe just bounces off it.

Try to burn hardwoods? What does that mean?

It’s wood. You put it in your fireplace and set fire to it for heat

Ah, sweet summer child.

When the days you have to break the ice on the dog's water bowl in the morning come, you will quickly learn what kinds of wood there are and what you want to burn for heat.

For example, if you choose a lot of paper birch (it splits easily, lights easily, and smells nice while burning) you will quickly get to know all the local firefighters after all your chimney fires.

As a fellow australian but now former wood chopper: "Try" should be "prefer".

IE when you get a load of firewood for the winter, you want it to be hardwood. The person you buy the wood from may mix in softwood depending on their trustworthiness...

Why prefer hardwood? Hardwood density means it will burn for ages. So you have to mess with the fire less and it'll still have at least hot coals in the morning if you put a log on before bed.

Jarrah, one of the hardest of the hard woods burns hot and long and (well ventilated) leaves almost no ash behind.

If you want hot coals in the morning, throw in a log or two of river gum / softer ashy woods before bedtime and the Jarrah coals will not burn out and disappear while the house sleeps but get buried in ash and stay hot but smothered.

Stir and throw in light kindling at dawn and it'll be roaring by the time you get back to the house for breakfast.

I had to take down two absolutely enormous Douglas Fir trees on my property (> 36" base), and asked them to leave the wood rounds for me. I knew it was going to be a lot of wood, but even then, I was not prepared. I spent about a fair bit of my free time over the next 1-2 months just out there slowly working my way through the pile, and you're absolutely right - you get substantially better at it. For me, it looked something like this:

Stage 1: At first, I could chop essentially nothing, probably 60+ minutes per round as I mostly puzzled about how to make progress and got lucky from time to time with a round that split easily (fortunately, I had a nice splitting axe)

Stage 2: Then I bought some splitting wedges, and I used a handheld sledgehammer to drive them in to what I thought were the weak spots, and then ultimately pried open the log, to pieces that I could split more readily.

Stage 3: I bought a massive demolition sledge hammer (essentially a two-handed battle hammer) and used that to drive the wedges in after getting them started, and made a bit more progress on actually splitting the rounds.

Stage 4: After doing this countless times, you just a knack for reading the wood, and where it will / won't split. I reverted back to using just the splitting axe, since if you hit the wood in the right spots, it really just splits on its own.

Here's where I ended up, if it helps any of you:

- Start by establishing the fracture line that will be used to split the round in half. I would eyeball any existing line on the round towards the center, and use the axe head to mark a line, away from any knots , from the center to the edge. These two center-to-edge didn't necessarily need to be inline. They could be slightly offset, like hands on a clock.

- With moderate force, just repeatedly strike that line, working from the center outwards. You'd be shocked out how quickly repeated strikes widen the line, and eventually the wood's own weight almost causes it to fall apart.

- Recursively do this with the two halves: Draw the line from (what was the center), radially out to the edge. Repeatedly strike until these pieces have been halved.

- Continue this process until you have proper pizza wedges. At this point, it's pretty trivial to just chop the pizza wedge, from the wedge to the base, into 4 or 5 smaller firewood-sized logs.

I know y'all probably didn't care to read this, but this was quite honestly weeks of my life in learning this, and I couldn't find a great guide on YouTube or anything, especially for rounds this big.

You can also score the ends of the rounds with your saw about an inch deep, laid out radially like you're cutting a pizza, then work your wedges in.

I don't burn softwood because hardwood is a much better fuel as a primary heat source, especially when you live in a mixed forest. Sugar maple, red oak, birch, and beech. Beech is the best: straight grain, good density, but less common where I live.

The trick to splitting hardwood, other than avoiding burls and knots, is to shave off chords around the outside of the buck. If you tried radial cuts or splitting on the diameter, well, best of luck with getting a season's wood split in one year. Chords around the circumference for about 50% of the buck, thenif you're lucky the core will split on the diameter.

Also, use a maul with fat cheeks and no edge rather than an axe. It's the right tool for the job.

Between yours and the parent comment, I'm just surprised how LONG splitting wood takes. A year for a season's wood feels much longer than I would have imagined.

I don’t know. Each year, my dad and I bring the chainsaw before November, fall some dead pines and cut them into logs. We either split them into firewood that evening or the next day. That’s enough for around 3 months of winter (center of Spain, cold, but almost never below 0C and never snows).

We don’t split the, into very small pieces, some logs we don’t even split as they fit into the fireplace in one piece. We don’t look for the highest girth, but for what’s more practical, yearly fires kill enough trees for that.

I live in Canada, winter is 6 months and we get a few weeks below -30 and deep snow November through March. It's a different story.

Yeah, I figured something like that

My experience is it takes 100 hours to buck, split, haul, and stack the 7 or so cords of wood it takes to heat my house. A cord is 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. The total time includes time it takes to sharpen the saw, and time it takes for trips to the gas station for gas for the saw and the splitter. Time for replacing the handle on the maul or the oil in the splitter is extra.

But that 100 hours is using a hydraulic splitter. Hand-splitting using a maul takes several hours longer. But it keeps you twice as warm: it heats you once when you split it and once when you burn it.

Advice I would add: use a tire when splitting firewood to hold the logs together. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMv6-SYzv-Q

Wood no longer goes flying. Much easier to chop quickly.

That’s a rad technique. Thanks for sharing.

I cared to read this :) Thanks for the effort invested.

It takes understanding rotation and momentum to do right. Also different to bet chops in different ways.

this is the most hacker news comment possible

So many of the top comments look like parodies of HN comments

I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over. I found it well made and deeply satisfying

> I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over.

Hit it around the edges, like taking a chord from the edge of a circle, and try to use the top half of the bit to do cutting. Good ax technique depends on accuracy, on top of which you can slowly add strength as your accuracy improves. If there's a crack in the end of a round, you should be able to put the bit of the ax directly into it, which will normally split it wide open without much effort. Different species of wood have different characteristics though, so terms and conditions apply.

> If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side

Just put it in a old small tire :)

As someone who spent a teenagehood doing the same, I agree it was far too (un)satisfying to be able to cut the pieces and not having them fall to the side. But if you have an excellent axe and true flat surface you could get pretty close to the game. But for better reality it needs more indication of splinters and blisters after a few runs. I suggest adding a cast iron wedge splitter as a next level option.

There should be a "hickory" option where the axe just bounces back at you or gets stuck in the round.

That's because the AI that generated this doesn't know what splitting wood is like.

Use a nice large maul. Will go through most wood like a butter knife.

I stupidly used a axe for a long time.

TIL about existence of (non-game like) mauls and that they might be used for splitting firewood.

Wait till you see the hydraulic mauls.

I dunno, what are you splitting? For full rounds or the large chunks that first split off them, I often do have stuff go flying when it finally splits. Typically I am splitting on top of another round so that adds to the distance.

As a very novice wood splitter the thing that most jumped out to me was the wood splitting in one swing every time. That's one or two orders of magnitude off from my experience.

I only like splitting perfectly seasoned wood ( I do about a face cord every summer/fall). Otherwise it’s just too much work. Got any tips in to tooling? I use a maul.

In my experience, fresh wood splits much easier. I prefer a big splitting axe. But mostly the wood I use isn’t terribly gnarled or wide.

I have a couple diamond/ grenade wedges, a rescue wedge and a traditional wedge I barely ever use. I have the big Fiskars maul and that is great for a lot of stuff. Bigger things, whole rounds I use two wedges near each other and hit them in concert with the sledge side of the maul.

Most wood is easier to split when dry/ aged, but I recently learned that does not apply to elm and a few others, so it’s worth checking. Elm is awful no matter what.

Elm is awful even at burning. Cold, smoky stuff.

Was just doing this literally the other day! But with a hydraulic log splitter which made it pretty easy and fun. The hardest part was lifting and stacking all the logs!

> This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood.

Neither mine, I have a machine that does it for me. Much safer and efficient.

I find it much easier to use AI to vibesplit my firewood. Sure, it costs me lots of money to buy axe tokens, and sometimes all I end up with is a useless pile of splinters or sawdust, but it's the way of the future; just imagine how efficient it'll be when the tech has matured?

The new model is so good at splitting firewood that it's too dangerous to release to the public without safeguards to stop it from splitting things that aren't actually firewood. The old models are terrible - I can't believe we ever thought they were good.

Remember: this is the worst that splitting firewood will ever be.

It might split atom's

You're right, and I'm sorry. You specifically instructed me to split the logs in the side yard, and I split the cat. I recognize now that this was a strategic error, and cutting the cat into chunks does not accomplish the goals.

    edit

    AGENTS.md
    + Only chop things made of wood. Meat does not split well. NEVER cut up the cat.

I've updated the AGENTS.md file to track this mistake in the future. Should I continue chopping the rest of the firewood?

Never set the cat on fire, it surely will annoy it.

If only you could pipe the waste heat from the data centre…

Not if you also want to get excellent exercise. It would take me no time at all to build a splitter for my tractor if I wanted one, but I plan on chopping by hand until I can't because otherwise I will either be significantly less fit or have to take out additional non-productive time to workout.

I'm right there with you. I've manually split wood with wedges when I was a kid. It was tedious. Now I just use the wedges for felling the trees. I get enough exercise from the stacking.

I've always felt the attraction to manual splitting was some idyllic vision of country life, backed up by the movie trope where characters are having "alone time" but still "being strong". I'd be interested to hear if anyone in this thread burns a significant amount of wood (say 4 cords), and actually splits it all by hand.

>doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood

can't wait to hear your comments after playing pacman: whoosh

yeaa https://i.imgur.com/Uc60Y2z.png

You missed the best part: analyzing what to do around knots. There's a skill and artistry to it. Those who are good at it make it look absolutely effortless: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsIFvStf9Oz99GMitW4vD_g

For anyone reading the above comment and wanting to see what the commenter might be referring to, here is the first YT video I found on that channel that is relatively brief but has an example of the techniques involved:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G_QZIGVYX_4

And as someone who has split my own firewood by hand for heating for the last 30 years, he definitely knows how to throw around an axe, almost too well because he makes it look easier than it is. But even when everything splits clean, him throwing an axe around for 30+ minutes straight and not being out of breath and able to still talk shows both immense fitness and experience.

Just fucking relax and enjoy!

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